The IEEE 802.11ad standard defines an interoperable physical (PHY) and Media Access Control (MAC) layer that may be used to enable point-to-multipoint communication between nodes within a network. Wireless chipset providers are developing complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) based baseband and Radio Frequency Integrated Circuit (RFIC) solutions as part of an overall Wi-Fi chipset product offering to enable low cost and low power solutions instead of implementing proprietary protocols and technologies in either field-programmable gate array (FPGA) or as custom application specific integrated circuits (ASICs).
These CMOS wireless chipsets implementing the 802.11ad standard, however, are engineered with a focus on short-range mobile communications which ultimately shaped the design of protocol, algorithms and beam forming codebooks employed by the chipsets when executing beam forming operations. However, for larger antenna arrays needed for long-range communication, the number of beams to be scanned for achieving proper coverage increases, resulting in increases in overhead for beam forming operations and beam forming training needed to establish a communication link between a pair of nodes. In some scenarios, the larger antenna arrays used for long-range communication simply do not support wireless chipsets implementing the 802.11ad standard. As a result, the CMOS wireless chipsets using 802.11ad are optimized for the short-range, indoor type of application and are therefore suboptimal for use in high-bandwidth backhaul applications that require long-range stationary communication.